EnterpriseDB Looks to Bolster Product Line

Fresh off a new round of financing, the company is pushing new versions of its PostgreSQL-based database products.

Fresh off a successful round of Series C venture capital financing, EnterpriseDB announced the launch of two new products today at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

The release of Postgres Plus 8.3 and Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3 are an attempt by the vendor to fully integrate its product portfolio and comes on the heels of the database company raising $10 million from a group of investors that included IBM.

The products were announced March 25 at the Open Source Business Conference.

"Everything we do is built on PostgreSQL technology, all of our people work on PostgreSQL-related products and services all day long, and we are contributors to the PostgreSQL community in many ways," said CEO Andy Astor, adding that the company is now working toward a single code base for both its products. "Previously, EnterpriseDB Postgres was built on a different development branch than EnterpriseDB Advanced Server. The release of the Postgres Plus product family reflects the integration of our product line."

PostgreSQL has long been in the shadow of MySQL when it comes to the number of open source database deployments. In January, Sun Microsystems spent $1 billion to acquire MySQL AB, leaving questions about its commitment to the PostgreSQL community, which it had supported for years. However, Sun officials have stressed the purchase of MySQL AB would not affect its commitment to PostgreSQL.

Officials at IBM said their investment in EnterpriseDB is a continuation of its interest in open source.

The 2008 Series C round financing has been part of EnterpriseDB's business plan for the past three years, Astor said, and will be used to expand the company's product portfolio and staff. With the release of Postgres Plus, EnterpriseDB is banking on ease of deployment, scalability and speed to move deeper into the market place. The product integrates PostgreSQL 8.3 with features meant to increase database response times, such as distributed memory caching, integrated connection pooling and workload profiling, company officials said.

Postgres Plus also includes Developer QuickStarts, which help developers quickly integrate Postgres Plus with popular Web 2.0 applications and provide fast, intuitive tools for defining, debugging and deploying Postgres Plus databases, Astor said. QuickStarts are available for a number of open-source applications, including Ruby on Rails, JBoss SEAM and REST architectures. More QuickStarts will be added in the coming weeks, company officials said.

Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a successor to EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, and adds additional functionality to Postgres Plus, including the ability to run applications created for Oracle databases, dynamic performance tuning and management and monitoring capabilities.